The variety of citizen science projects available - from the structure of proteins to mapping galaxies - is staggering, and continues to grow. Here I give a citizen’s perspective on the benefits of participation, and explore how these extend far beyond data collection and analysis.

The Zooniverse is enabling citizen science across multiple domains from astronomy to zoology and more than 900,000 volunteers have signed up to take part. This talk will describe the platform and talk about its future.

Crowdcrafting empowers citizens to become active players in scientific projects by donating their time in order to solve micro-task problems or by becoming researchers creating their own projects in minutes. This results in making science more accessible to everyone, engaging society in science.

Everyone should have the opportunity to play their part in the protection of the places and ecosystems where they live and work. ECSA will start to make that happen in Europe.
ECSA will advance and promote citizen science in a Europe where citizens are valued as a key component, advancing knowledge about the sustainable development of our world.
Engaging with disadvantaged communities is also a key goal of ECSA. Individuals will be encouraged to take an active role in the development of a sustainable society, helping to protect and improve health and the environment.

ECSA will:
• support the growth of national citizen science communities across the EU;
• share knowledge and skills on citizen science;
• develop EU wide citizen science programmes;
• identify, develop and promote best practice and excellence in citizen science;
• collaborate with the growing international citizen science community.

The Association has been very recently registered in Berlin.
Prof. Dr. Johannes Vogel has been appointed as director, Dr. Andrea Sforzi and Prof. Dr. Jaqueline McGlade have been elected as co-directors.

Delegates from 12 European Countries took part to the preliminary meetings.
Four working groups have been created so far (chairman):
- Fundraising, membership, communications, promotion and marketing and events (Josep Perello)
- Policy, strategy, governance and partnerships (Martin Brocklehurst)
- Standards, principles, best practice and capacity building (Lucy Robinson)
- Projects, data, tools and technology (Jaume Piere).

The ECSA first General Assembly will be held in Copenhagen on the next 8th April.
If you would like to take part, please contact Katrin Vohland (Katrin.Vohland@mfn-berlin.de).

The Mozilla Science Lab is a new initiative of the Mozilla Foundation exploring how the power of the open web can change the way science is done. We build educational resources, tools and prototypes for the research community to make science more open, collaborative and efficient.

But what does the "power of the web" truly mean? This talk will look at recent work of the Mozilla Science Lab, as well as delve into the characteristics of the web that underpin and enable open research.

Policy is an important but often overlooked component of citizen science projects. There are operational data policy considerations, such as user agreements, terms of use, and privacy. There are laws and regulations that may either encourage or inhibit government use of citizen science data. In the United States, these include the U.S. Paperwork Reduction Action, U.S. Data Quality Act, and U.S. Anti-Deficiency Act. And, there is the potential impact of citizen science on public policy objectives. This presentation will touch on each of these three areas. Presented by Lea Shanley and Anne Bowser, Commons Lab, Wilson Center.

Citizen science is a rapidly growing field; however, citizen science does not have many implementations in quantum physics. This is probably due to the difficulty of explaining the sometimes highly counterintuitive nature of quantum phenomena, and resulting difficulties designing a platform that enables users to contribute to this highly specialized field of research.

Quantum Moves (QM) is a new scientific research game that lets online players help solve real quantum physical research problems. The aim of QM is twofold. We have a specific set of research problems concerning the development of a quantum computer. We expect players to do well on the challenge not only due to the sheer number of players, but also because of human skills such as pattern recognition and intuitive cognitive capabilities related to spatial navigation. In all branches of citizen science it is of interest to know how large at fraction of the community are able to contribute to science with their actions. Parallel to the main data gathering through QM, we seek to answer that question by quantitatively investigating how human solutions compare to optimization algorithms in a wide range of quantum-inspired problems.
We present preliminary results showing how our community compares to optimization algorithms, on our quantum computer challenge and in a variety of more general problems.

In QM, the community is included in the design process both directly by contributing with ideas and suggestions and indirectly as test cases. We present the different phases of the design process from our first beta version failures including way too many options, too little help, and too difficult access, to a recent 2x2 A/B design-experiment where a large group of new community members unknowingly, were presented with four slightly different versions of the game in order to investigate hypothesized motivational structures in the design. We discuss the difficulties deriving from the quantum nature of our problem, and how we try to solve them by gradually empowering our community to perform better on our scientific challenges.

Customized versions of QM were implemented and tested at different stages of the design process in Danish science classrooms. Our preliminary results shows that students are highly motivated by the aspect of doing “real science”, however they need help linking the knowledge and spatial skills they obtain in the game to their “normal” physics education. The design process of making a strong link from game to the physics behind, which is also important to a segment of the online players, is ongoing based on the feedback of students as well as the online community.

QM is the first game on our webpage www.scienceathome.org. We are currently working on implementing more quantum physics citizen science games, as well as a new game where players can help making good causal hypotheses about player motivation, behavior and performance. Our vision is to collect a broad spectrum of gamified research problems in scienceathome.org, making it a hub for citizen scientists who want to contribute to science at home.

Learning nowadays should be more synonymous of ability to carefully read the complex environment we live in and to identify the most important instruments to adapt to it and to help in taking decisions.
In this talk I will briefly show how users learn to recognize the noise level around them by continuously using the WideNoise mobile application and how they are able to estimate the air pollution levels by annotating the map of their city.

In this talk we argue the need for balancing the basic pillars technology, data and people in participatory sensing frameworks, and discuss how we visited and revisit these aspects in our past, present and future work. An important bridging notion therein is that of a campaign. We argue the need for orchestration support for campaigns to achieve data quality, automatisation of said support to achieve scalability, and user-friendliness to reach as many stakeholders as possible. Note this goes further than merely providing support for defining campaigns, an issue tackled in several recent research projects. We provide a formal definition of a campaign by extracting commonalities from expertise in organising collaborative mapping campaigns with NoiseTube. Next, we formalise how to ensure that campaigns end successfully (in terms of data quality), and translate this formal notion into an operational recipe for campaign monitoring orchestration. We then present a framework for automatising campaign orchestration which relies on workflow technology and meta-logic reasoning. We end by expanding on requirements to expand upon the 3 pillars of participatory sensing, i.e. allowing more people to collect heterogeneous data with generalised technological platforms. We argue that to make this feasible it is crucial to construct platforms which are reconfigurable by stakeholders (who are not ICT experts), and present a roadmap for achieving this goal.

Citizen science and community-based monitoring programs are increasing in number, breadth, and popularity. These programs operate at multiple spatial and temporal scales, address myriads of issues, generate volumes of diverse scientific data, and involve numerous stakeholders. To be effective, such programs must ask questions, form teams, manage members, identify protocols, collect data, share results, and evaluate success. On face value, these tasks may seem simple. In reality, they are diverse, complex, and demanding of limited program resources. To address these challenges, we built an open and comprehensive cyber-infrastructure support system for citizen science programs (www.citsci.org) to support the full spectrum of program management and data management, analysis, and visualization needs. The system affords program coordinators the opportunity to create their own projects, manage project members, build their own data sheets, streamline data entry, visualize data on maps, automate custom analyses, and get feedback. Thus far, CitSci.org has engaged 78+ programs resulting in some 12,838+ species observations and 33,694+ site characteristics. The majority of programs are bottom-up, grassroots efforts with conservation biology-oriented goals and objectives. Here, we discuss the unique opportunities afforded by CitSci.org platform to support the needs of citizen science programs; connect people, nature, and research; and encourage and foster meta-analyses across domains and projects.

The Open Air Laboratories (OPAL) tree health survey was developed by a partnership involving a wide range of Government agencies, devolved administrations, academia and third sector organisations. The survey aims to raise the public’s awareness of trees and tree health. Additionally, citizens will act as extra eyes for pests and diseases which are threatening our trees, thereby supporting surveillance by the limited number of official forestry and plant health inspectors. Such prompt detection should give us the best possible chance of eradicating the pest or disease before it becomes established.

*This talk is part of the TECHNOLOGY AND CITIZEN SCIENCE (BIOLOGY) track*

In many places, the term "amateur" gets thrown around as a derogatory term. Amateurs are considered hacks or half-wits, but what happens when we embrace the amateur and remind ourselves that the term is rooted in the idea of pursuing something simply for the love it? We remember that the greatest pursuit is one based on passion and, as communities, we end up creating more value than we capture when we put people 1st and data 2nd. Through the process of designing and building Project Noah, one of the largest online communities for wildlife exploration and environmental education, we have learned that amazing breakthroughs can be made when we put people first and encourage amateurs and experts to collide.

*This talk is part of the TECHNOLOGY AND CITIZEN SCIENCE (BIOLOGY) track*

“Do it youself” biology is a relatively recent umbrella term for citizen science in molecular biotechnology. The talk will give an overview of the opportunities and challenges of this branch of citizen science focusing in particular on the activities that we have been involved in since collaborating with “biohackers” via the UCL iGEM team (international genetically engineered machine competition).
This will include the “Public BioBrick” collaboration between a group of London based “biohackers” and UCL’s team.
The talk will make the case for specific hardware, software and wetware that is necessary for DIYbio. As an example, we are presenting DarwinToolbox, a biotechnology laboratory “in a box” for citizen science and education. Darwin Toolbox is under active development at UCL and we are very interested in any feedback that we might get from participants at the summit.

In this workshop we will be exploring how to design a web-based citizen science project with the volunteer in mind. We are hoping to bring together designers, evaluators, and volunteers of citizen science projects. Workshop participants will be asked to reflect upon their own experience to answer the following questions:

· What makes a citizen science project enjoyable for volunteers?
· What makes a citizen science project useful for volunteers?

*This talk is part of the CREATIVITY & LEARNING track*
Public Participation in Scientific Research (PPSR) occurs in a much wider variety of contexts and disciplines than many people realize, ranging from birders collecting diversity data to community-based organizations studying local air and water quality. Based on work with colleagues, I will describe our framework that attempts to capture this wide range, examining scientific and participant objectives and outcomes, and the strengths that can be drawn from each to bolster the impacts of the other across Contributory, Collaborative and Co-Created projects. My key focus will be on the complexities of the concept of participation, examining the degree and quality of participation in these myriad PPSR projects, and how these affect the benefits to the public participants, the scientists, and the larger social-ecological system. Through a collaborative NSF-funded meta-analysis of adult programs and a comparative case study of youth programs, I am surveying and interviewing participants to examine how participation impacts individuals in terms of their science and environmental learning. What do individuals learn about science and environmental stewardship by participating? What do children learn about civic engagement and themselves as scientists? As the field of PPSR grows, many of us as researchers are moving beyond project-level impacts to look at the comparative impacts, processes and practices across many PPSR projects. I hope to facilitate practitioners and researchers of PPSR in education, natural sciences and social justice to think about how their work might connect to, impact, expand and inspire the work of people outside their traditional disciplines and networks.

Pandemic spread of infectious respiratory diseases is among the biggest threats to human society due
to their high mortality and frequent occurrences. As a result, it is of high priority for governments and health organisations to predict such cases and devise effective control strategies. A prerequisite of this task is a deep understanding of human contact networks, since respiratory diseases predominantly transmit via droplets and air-borne route both of which work only in physically close proximity interactions (CPIs).

Consequently, we developed PEARL, an application running on Android mobile phones, to probe physical interactions among people in real life. With helps from 375 volunteers in a college of a Chinese university, we acquired the real interaction data lasting for 90 days. Analysis suggests that the physical interactions among students is neither scale-free nor small-world. The special interaction pattern leads to a special spreading pattern for infectious disease such as influenza, TB, etc. Simulation also suggests that "class-cancelation" strategy is more efficient than other quarantining strategies.